Grunting Boosts Your Performance, Study Finds

Trending News: Grunting Might Be Annoying, But It Really Does Help Your Gains

Long Story Short

That guy grunting over there on the bench press is onto something, according to a new study.

Long Story

We can all agree grunting is one of the most annoying gym habits of all time. It's so agitating that some gyms will tell you to quiet down if you do it too loudly. But sadly — if you like to workout in peace — grunting really does work, according to a new study in PLOS ONE.

Researchers had 20 mixed martial arts fighters kick a 100-pound heavy bag. For some kicks, the fighters grunted. For others, they stayed silent. It turned out that the kicks with grunts added 9% more g-force.

Grunting has also raised some controversy in tennis, where intense shrieks like Maria Sharapova's have been called cheating. To find out if grunting really is intimidating, researchers showed the participants videos of an MMA fighter launching a flurry of kicks at them, Ong Bak-style, I'd like to believe.

It turned out that the kicks where the fighter grunted were more intimidating than silent ones.

"In previous work using similar conditions to those used here, participants were slower and made more errors when responding to the direction of a tennis shot that included a simulated grunt," the researchers wrote in the paper. "In the present study distraction is likely the only viable explanation, as the act of kicking does not involve multisensory signals that could be masked."

So yeah, letting out a big grunt for that last deadlift could very well help you finish off your set. But hopefully, the guy next to you doesn't finish your annoying ass off first.